A community-engaged English composition course is building more confident writers

Piper Bailey | March 11, 2025

While it might seem incongruous for an introductory writing class to be built around community engagement, a UCLA course led by Tara Prescott-Johnson is just that — with benefits for both UCLA students and local nonprofits. 

Prescott-Johnson, a UCLA continuing lecturer, has taught English Composition, Rhetoric, and Language in one form or another since 2011 — and she began including a community engagement component three years later. Ever since, the class has been building Bruins’ writing skills and confidence while immersing them in the operations of local nonprofits.

The course requires students to spend 20 hours at their chosen organization over the course of an academic quarter, and writing assignments are structured around their observations.

Here’s how it works: First, students choose one of three community organizations they want to work with. This quarter, the partner organizations are 826LA, which provides writing programs for children and teens; the California Science Center; and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

Students visit the sites, meet with staff and take a tour. Prescott-Johnson encourages them to pay particular attention to how the nonprofit caters to its community, whether the organization makes visitors feel like they matter, and whether its programs are accessible and inclusive. Their impressions — along with interviews of staff and volunteers — become the basis for one of the class’s three primary writing assignments.

Students return to the sites throughout the term and continue to write about their experiences. For the final paper, students write a professional report that analyzes and critiques some aspect of the nonprofit’s operation.

“Because they are using their own observations and experiences on site, the students often go deep in their writing,” Prescott-Johnson said. “Their essays are deeply personal, even when they are also writing lists of professional recommendations for a nonprofit.”

But those recommendations aren’t merely fodder for academic writing exercises, Prescott-Johnson said. They actually are shared with the nonprofits’ management. “The organizations are very interested in getting feedback from our students, particularly about how they can improve,” she said.

A student in last year’s cohort, for example, suggested that 826LA make more of its materials available in Spanish to better serve its volunteers and faculty. (Prescott-Johnson said she did not know whether the nonprofit had acted on the recommendation yet.) This quarter, the students working at the California Science Center shared feedback — based on their own experience — about how the institution could condense the on-boarding process for new volunteers.

When it comes to building writing skills, one key element of the course is peer review. Students share drafts of their assignments with another for feedback and edits before Prescott-Johnson reviews them.

“Writing is not an isolated thing,” Prescott-Johnson said. “It’s done between people.” 

For their part, students say the approach helps build confidence in their own writing.

“I’m always really nervous when I hand in an essay, but I just love getting the feedback,” said Nicolás Duffy, a member of the current class. “My peer reviewer said my writing was sharp and concise, and those were two precise things I wanted to work on.”

Among the topics Prescott-Johnson covers during classroom sessions are crafting thesis statements; building papers around a strong, arguable claim; writing for a professional audience; how to provide sophisticated feedback on peers’ writing — and how to receive it.

Duffy said his experience at the LGBT Center has already improved his ability to translate personal experiences into well-articulated, academic papers.  

“My time at the LGBT Center has exposed me to individuals and perspectives that broadened my view as a writer,” Duffy said. “Researching LGBTQ+ theory and interviewing queer people has given me insight into my methodology of research and summarizing arguments. I have also learned how to communicate as part of a team as a volunteer.”

Prescott-Johnson, who received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2022, was the first Writing Programs lecturer to offer a community-engaged composition course. Her experience helped shape Writing Programs’ successful proposal for a 2024–25 departmental capacity grant from the UCLA Center for Community Engagement. The funding is intended to support the development of courses that elevate students’ experiences and bolster UCLA’s relationships with community organizations. 

This course fulfills UCLA’s undergraduate diversity and writing I requirements.